Ultionus is a love-letter to the home computer arcade games of the late 80s and early 90s, with colorful 2D visuals, catchy chiptune music by the legendary Jake 'Virt' Kaufman, and 7 stages of hard-as-nails gameplay.

Recommended By Curators

Reviews

“The levels and characters are all fun to look at, and the whole world seems lush and alive.”
3.8/5 – Mash Those Buttons

“...the crass humor may not appeal to everyone, the sharp design and challenge that’s found in Ultionus will strike some kind of chord with anyone who initially play it and nostalgia withstanding.”
4/5 – Press Pause Radio

About This Game

Galactic hero Serena S has been trolled on Spacebook. This is obviously a cause to embark on an epic quest to punish the troll in question, who just happens to be The Space Prince. Guide Serena through 7 stages of shmup action, jumping, shooting, and yet decidedly more jumping and shooting to her ultimate goal of total testicular annihilation of her foe. Ultionus is a love-letter to the home computer arcade games of the late 80s and early 90s, particularly Halloween Harry, Astro Marine Corps, Duke Nukem 2 and especially Phantis/Game Over II. The game features tons of lovingly crafted pixel art, and a rockin' chiptune soundtrack by the legendary Jake 'Virt' Kaufman.

I love the style and look of the game! It's fun, but the fatal flaw is that every time you shoot, she stops for a split second. You can't actually move and shoot at the same time. Combine this with infinitely spawning enemies, and you're constantly having to stop and shoot, stop and shoot, stop and shoot... it gets a bit monotonous.

I tried this because we're playing some of the soundtrack on my show. The music (by Jake Kaufman) is excellent. The game itself is quite awful. Control and movement feel archaic and make combat a chore. Boss battles show a hint of promise but are largely trial-and-error. Various depictions of the heroine throughout the game are pretty tasteless.

I ended up playing through the entire thing because I'm stubborn and also because I hoped it might evolve or improve, but it did not. Thankfully, it's mercifully short. If you're interested in a retro platformer with some challenge, I recommend you just buy the soundtrack to this and play Rex Rocket instead.

If you're going to make a challenging platformer, you better have responsive controls. Your character in this game controls like mud, and you cannot shoot vertically upwards for some asinine reason. You literally can only shoot upwards at a 30 degree angle.

This was tolerable up to a point, even though there's no excuse for it. The breaking point was an elevator level that went on seemingly forever, with a flying enemy with tons of hit points, who you have to shoot at (30 degree awkward shots) and quickly duck out of the way - except the animation time between shooting and ducking takes a long time, and that was when I put the game down.

I recommend this game, but with a huge caveat. How much do you really enjoy retro platforming?

Everything about this game is very well done: graphics, the Heavy Metal magazine heroine, and the fantastic soundtrack. There's even a good bit of replay value, which isn't always the case for platformers. The gameplay is... well, "retro".

If you've never experienced actual older games, or you tend to forget how many of them actually sucked, I recommend watching a playthrough of a game called Phantis, which this game is basically a remake or spiritual sequel of. With some exceptions, older platforming games often had slow, sluggish protagonists, with fast, incessantly spawning enemies, with awkward jumping and shooting controls. This game is no exception.

Serena walks slowly. She has to stand still to shoot. There's a small delay both before and after firing the actual projectile. She can only shoot up at a shallow angle (perhaps 30 degrees), but not straight up. You get hurt from touching a robot's toe or a wizard's robe. Additionally, the delay in firing means that if you try shooting just before you land, you won't fire. Even her ship takes a moment to accelerate to full speed when moving up or down. None of these would be a huge problem by themselves, but combined, it can lead to some very frustrating moments.

Everything else about Ultionus is improved over the older games; why not tighten up the gameplay too? There are also plenty of other "retro" games that actually have really great controls.

As I'm sure most can agree, it's more fun to challenge the game, not its controls. But if you love punishing gameplay, repetition until perfection, or just love all platforming games, then it's hard to do wrong by Ultionus. Even better, it's very inexpensive.

There's a lot to like about Ultonions: the bright retro graphics, the chip'ish music and even the sexuliased 80s heroine. But... The gameplay is not quite bad but the design aimed for retro and ended up with unresponsive instead.

You can aim in only 4 directions, left, diagonal left/up. right and diagonal right/up. It would have been better as an 8-way scheme. Or even just up - I want to shoot up.

You can shoot or walk, not both. And you walk slowly. This may be a side effect but quickly swinging round to shoot and swinging back again seem to stick. This is incredibly annoying when dealing with fast moving flying enemies.

The crouch animation is unusually long, you must wait for it to finish before firing or walking again. Popping down to shoot and popping back up to jump and dodge stuff is not going to happen.

About a fifth of your view is obscured on the left and right by the decorative interface. This makes the dino-riding stage particularly vexing as you can't see what's coming.

I cramped my thumb trying shoot fast - I haven't managed that since I had a Commodore 64. Not sure if this is a good or bad point.

I'm not recommending this but is a weak non-recommendation. Learning from your mistakes is big part of the game and that's good reto but not having the space to see or control responsiveness to react is bad retro. Games like Thundercats, Mask and Turrican all got this right 30 years ago - Ultonious really should have too.